Efficiency and quality are a pair of everlasting contradictions in manufacturing industry. To achieve atomic surface, it usually consists of rough, precision, and ultra-precision polishing. These processes contain generally several to tens of polishing pads, slurries, and setups, which is time-consuming and expensive. These diverse pads, slurries, and setups are strictly separated, avoiding contamination, damage, and corrosion. To solve these challenges, a novel composite polishing system was developed, using a developed hyper-conjugated polishing pad and custom-made green slurry, through adjusting the temperature of slurry to control the material removal rate (MRR). The MRR was controlled between 40.99 and 133.91 nm/min, by adjusting the temperature between 40 and 80 ℃ via splitting of fibers. After pre-polishing by rare earth cerium oxide abrasive and atomic level polishing by proposed composite system, atomic surface is garnered on fused silica with surface roughness Sa of 0.117 nm at a scanning area of 50 × 50 μm². It is unprecedented that the developed polishing system realized atomic surface integrating rough and fine polishing on a setup by a composite fiber polishing pad and a new green chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) slurry. The CMP slurry included silica, hydrogen peroxide, sodium hydroxy cellulose, and sodium carbonate. Transmission electron spectroscopy confirms that the thickness of damaged layer is 1.89 nm. Prior to and after splitting of fibers, diameter, bending length, and Shore hardness decreased from 18.33 to 2.48 μm, 13.7 to 4.6 cm, and 52.7 to 20.5 HC, respectively, reducing 86.5%, 66.4%, and 61.1% correspondingly. However, wicking height and specific surface area increased from 7.5 to 14.1 cm, and 0.028 to 1.926 m²/g, separately, enhancing 88% and 6779%, accordingly. An interactive model was built among a single fiber, abrasive, and workpiece. After splitting of fibers, the maximum stress exerted on axial and radial directions of fiber are 2.45 and 1.36 MPa, respectively, reducing 59% and 73% compared with those of prior to splitting correspondingly. A model of repeated unit cell was constructed between polishing pad and slurry. It is calculated that the stress of 51.15% units is in the range between 0.1 and 0.5 MPa, while that of 92.83% fibers varies from 0.05 to 1 MPa after splitting. A macroscale model of polishing pad was established. Peak stress of an unsplit pad is high up to 13.19 MPa, while that of split one decreases to 2.42 MPa, reducing 81.65%. At an actual polishing pressure of 30 kPa, contact area of a split polishing pad between fibers and workpiece reaches 15.38%, promoting 44.09% compared with that of an unsplit one. Our developed composite polishing system paves a new way to fabricate atomic surface using a hyper-conjugated polishing pad and a green slurry on a setup, saving several and tens of various pads, slurries, and setups, which are both time and cost-effective and has broad prospects in manufacturing industry.

Planning the polishing path is an important part of the polishing process. Reasonable selection of the polishing path can improve surface quality and reduce the mid-spatial frequency (MSF) error. In this paper, a six-directional pseudorandom consecutive unicursal polishing path and the corresponding generation method are proposed. The proposed path is especially useful for suppressing the MSF error of the surface and realizing consecutive uniform coverage. Compared with traditional polishing paths such as scanning, spiral, and fractal, the proposed path has the following characteristics: multi-directionality, high randomness, smoothness, and consecutiveness. In order to verify that the proposed path has the ability to suppress the MSF error, a group of contrast experiments were conducted and the measurement data was processed by the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method and the fast Fourier transform (FFT) method. The results show that the fluctuation amplitude of the MSF error and the fluctuation area with MSF error are obviously reduced by using the proposed path. Moreover, the corresponding wavelength of the crests in the spectrum shows multi-values. The experimental results show that the proposed path has high randomness and the ability to suppress the MSF error.

As a new polishing method, bonnet polishing is suitable for polishing the curved surface due to its advantages in flexibility and adaptability of the polishing tool. In the polishing process, the contact state between the bonnet and the curved surface always changes. The traditional polishing tool path with equal interval will inevitably lead to over-polished areas and unpolished areas. In this article, a new tool path for bonnet polishing, which is called the revised Archimedes spiral polishing path, is proposed to ensure the physical uniform coverage of the curved surface in bonnet polishing. The path generation method is based on the modified tool–workpiece contact model and the pointwise searching algorithm. To prove the effectiveness of the revised path, two aspheric workpieces were polished along the traditional Archimedes spiral polishing path and the revised path, respectively. The roughnesses of the two workpieces are 10.94 and 10 nm, and the profile tolerances are 0.4097 and 0.2037 μm, respectively. The experimental results show that the revised path achieves lower roughness and surface tolerance than the traditional Archimedes path, which indicates that the revised path can achieve uniform physical coverage on the surface.